An amazing story ...

An amazing story … Came home to the answer machine light blinking. It was message
from a guy in Seattle, Washington, named Roger Ligrano. Said he had come by 19
or 20 paintings by a David Grossblatt. And that he had looked him up on the internet
and found my website on the Café Rienzi, and could I please call him back, as
they were very eager to find out the background of these paintings. When I called,
Roger Ligrano, as it turns out, is also an artist. He has exhibited with Dale
Chihuly at the New York Botanical Gardens in 2006. Anyway, here’s how the story
unfolds … A friend of Roger’s somehow managed to intercept three truckloads worth
of paintings on their way to the dump. He salvaged 19 or 20 of them and took them
to Roger. Roger started hunting down the artist. “Do you know,” he told me, “there
is almost nothing about David Grossblatt on the web? But whatever there is seems
to be closely related to this Café Rienzi.” He had come across my Rienzi page
and from there discovered my business page and phone number and decided he would
attempt to contact me after a number of other leads failed. He was very interested
in finding out about the artist, and whomever was getting rid of these paintings,
and about the Café Rienzi. So I called my Aunt Joan and Uncle Tom and am in the
process of hopefully hooking them up with Roger so he can interview them, so to
speak. In the meantime, Roger emailed several photographs of David’s paintings,
and without further ado, here they are:


Featuring the Discovered Works of Artist David Grossblatt, Co-owner of the Cafe Rienzi


courtesy of Ligrano Studios, Seattle, Washington












More tidbits from my conversation with Aunt Joan and Uncle Tom:

More Memories of the Cafe Rienzi

This comment about the Cafe Rienzi came to me on another message board by the way of Doug Schneider:

A bunch of my high school friends and I would take the Long Island Rail Road into New York, and head for the Paperbook Gallery. After buying our books, we would then go the the Cafe Rienzi. Here I would order a himbeersaft and hope that people would think I was a real beatnik, instead of a high school kid from the suburbs.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Doug! I was no where near New York and the Rienzi during my high school years, unfortunately. That was in the sixties. Makes me feel like I missed out. I just remember the stories my aunt told of the original founders starting it up and the hi-jinx and fights - arguing violently about how to cut the cake and what size to serve and throwing plates at each other across the kitchen. I think that last part was primarily my aunt and uncle's doing, lol!

My parents divorced when I was 13 or 12 and living in South America. But in my childhood, we used to be in and out of New York all the time visiting my grandparents and aunt. I loved to spend the night with Aunt Joan - she was so much fun. She'd take me to Charlie Chaplin movies in the Village and to coffee houses to get that real Italian lemon ice. I knew about real lemon ice and cappucino long before they found their way into the midwest mainstream - and it's still hard to find a really good one (of either) here in the midwest, altho occasionally I get lucky. Uncle Tom took me to his painting studio and let me paint.

Sometimes the family would eat out in the Village too - I remember this one place that had a garden area in back where you could eat outside - I think my Mom and Dad, and Aunt Joan and Uncle Tom, and I were all there for a Sunday meal. I was really little and I tried to catch the pidgeons ...

JuneBug

larry's Memories of the Rienzi

Just got a response back from larry, Harry Justman's nephew about the Cafe Rienzi.

"I was about 12 when harry left the biz.....my brother david did work at the rienzi on sunday afternoons for a while . I recall harry having only one partner named david....last name unknown. I could draw a floor plan from memory. I recall the display of fancy Italian pastries.....flimsy wire backed chairs and tables....real la bohme territory....big brass colored expresso machines...a dinky kitchen facility. While in law school in 1979 a friend of mine arranged a double date.....and in the middle dinner it flashed on me ......this resturaunt is the old rienzi, a proustian moment.

as to memories....my parents . quite provincial, seemed facinated by the bohemian types.....and as a child it was clear that my parents thought the patrons a bit exotic/dangerous.

harry liked the beats .....and got out of the biz when the beats morphhed into hippies.....who he did not like. My cousin nina had a birthday party in the back area .....complete with a then exotic pinata.

Before passin I would ask harry about the various iconic peoples passin through in rienzis heyday.

he would repond with statments like.....Kerouac, a fucking drunk............ect.

regret not being more concrete .....i was very young."

Thanks, larry!

Junebug

Thanks to Harry Justman's nephew ...

... for passing on this piece of information about the Cafe Rienzi.

"my uncle harry justman was one of the original owners......he sold his intrest in the mid 60's. my parents spent time there occasionally on sunday afternoons with my brother ands and me. my mom was harry,s only sibling.Harry died approximatley 4 years ago and is survived by his sister, two daughters,and four grandchildren."

Thanks, larry! Do you have any personal memories of the Rienzi? I was pretty young when my aunt and uncle got out of the scene. I have personal memories of Greenwich Village coffee houses, but they're pretty vague.

JuneBug

Beginnings of the Cafe Rienzi ...

Okay, I finally have time to sit down and type out a few notes from my last telephone conversation with my aunt about the Cafe Rienzi. It was started by a group of seven friends who were writers and painters in Greenwich Village:

• Tom and Joan Durant - Joan was a pianist and a writer, and Tom was a painter and philosopher.
• Eva (an Austrian immigrant) and Gert (a German immigrant) Berliner* - Gert was a painter. I'm not sure what Eva's art passion was at that time. Gert and Eva eventually separated and Eva is now a retired professor at an exclusive college in New York City.
• Amy Nakamura* (from Japan) - I believe Amy was an artist.
• David Grossblatt - a painter
• Harry Justman and Gloria Siegal

The Cafe Rienzi opened in June 1952 at 113 MacDougal Street. It was the first popular Coffee House in the Village. It had 25 to 30 tables - and seated 150 to 200 people. It had a back room and a front room. There were other Cafes in the Village at that time - small Italian Cafes, that only Italians went to - and a ritzy Cafe named The Peacock.
From the stories I heard growing up, it was a successful albeit tempestuous start. The original group of friends left one by one. Uncle Tom left after the first few months - actually I recall Aunt Joan told me once that the group (including her) kicked him out - I need to get the rest of that story.
Gert, Eva's husband, was the next to leave, and then Aunt Joan left in November and realized a life dream when she traveled to Europe for the first time. She went over on the Queen Mary.
Eventually Harry and David had the Cafe for ten years.
Almost all the famous writers and painters of the fifties and sixties, the beats and the abstract expressionists, frequented the Cafe - and my Aunt and Uncle had opportunity to meet them before they really became famous. Poets - Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Allosci. Artists and sculptors - Mary Frank and Robert Frank, Franz Klein, Jackson Pollock, DeKooning, Bob DeNiro (the actor's father), and Paul Resika, who painted Aunt Joan's portrait and who lived downstairs from Edward Hopper. Writers like Larry Rubin, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.
Aunt Joan recalled that they used to have loft parties and that she and Bob DeNiro used to love to dance together to Billie Holiday's music. Aunt Joan was also a counselor and teacher's aid at the Greenwich House for the son - Bob DeNiro the actor when he was a boy.
Well, other duties call, and that's about all I have for now. I'm hoping that Aunt Joan and Eva will be supplying me with more stories as time passes by. Aunt Joan wrote a couple of plays based on the Cafe Rienzi that were performed on Off Broadway.
JuneBug
*Thanks to Artemesia for the corrections on the names!

Memories of the Cafe Rienzi

first in a series of posts on the Cafe Rienzi

There are 11,000 hits when you "google" the internet for information of the Cafe Rienzi on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, New York. It is mentioned in reminiscences and memoires of famous authors and poets and artists and musicians and even in the speech of a Nobel prize winner (The Dream Machine-Nobel Speech mentions the Rienzi). James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and many, many more well known names crop up in connection with this cafe - as well as memories of many ordinary people who visted it and frequented it. It was a apparently a Mecca for these types of people in the 50's and 60's much like Paris was a Mecca for artists in decades and centuries preceeding.

What seems little known about the Cafe Rienzi is its beginnings - its roots. My aunt and uncle were two of the original group of friends who launched the Cafe Rienzi in the early 50's. I grew up hearing all those stories - the good times, the fights, and how one by one the original group sold their share and left. My aunt said she received $2000 for her share and spent two months or two years in Europe in grand style in London and Paris and Italy. She went over on the Queen Mary.

By now my aunt and uncle and the other folks who started the Cafe Rienze are quite elderly - in their 80's. But here I hope to start a thread of their memories of this historic and influential Cafe and piece of 20th Century American history. I have asked my aunt to write some of her memories about it, and she in turn has asked her friend Eva, and we will see if those are forthcoming - but for now, my feeble notes will have to do.
More to come as I get the time! My Aunt Joan and Uncle Tom Durant, two of the founders of the Cafe Rienzi, are pictured below.

JuneBug

On Morning Commutes, Job Rewards, and Other Matters ...

Ah, how I've been enjoying the morning drive to work these past few months! Exceptionally blessed are they who get to park in clearings and breath in cool, clean fresh air from the trees that surround them as they climb out of the car, who pull up next to a cardinal perched in a red berry bush and corn blue wildflowers that shyly peek out from their leaves, who travel only country roads and lanes at the edge of town instead of crowded city thru-ways and high-speed four-lane highways, who have only two stop lights to worry about the whole trip, who take only fifteen minutes - more or less - to get to work, who work in sequestered modern office buildings - built of stone and wooden stair rails and big glass windows - in wooded areas off the main drag, and who drive past fields, subdivisions, cemetaries, churches, county schools, and country homes and farmsteads only freshly overtaken by the burgeoning town. And who also must make an easy detour around the train that occasionally crosses the towpath that winds its way through the woods.

Summer Lights

This picture is as close as I've been able to come to the memories of my childhood when the lightening bugs were out in July.

I'm still learning to take decent pictures of lightening bugs. It's hard. =:O

I took this picture on a very slow setting, the camera propped on the arm of a bench to steady it, no flash,and with the multiple spot meter setting. (Hence the streaks) I then "developed" and enhanced it in Photoshop with the curve, saturation, and artistic tools, to make the little guys show up like they normally would to the naked eye. :)

There just don't seem to be as many lightening bugs in recent years as I recall in my mind's eye ...




Click on the image to see it at higher resolution

Fire FliesCome ride with me 'neath fading skies,

past floating fields of fire flies

Like champagne bubbles, they burst and rise,

and steal the star light from the skies.

Now here, now gone, the summer flies,

and fades to autumn before our eyes

So come ride with me in the pale moonrise,

past floating fields of fire fliesJeanne Winstead Copyright 2001 more of JuneBug's poetry


Happy ShutterBugging!

JuneBug

And then it was over ...

Wow, it's been awhile.

I know I said I was going to do a series on job interview questions, as I continued my job search, but guess what? After five years - count 'em, 1,2,3,4,5 - (well technically I was finishing up a masters and doing a graduate assistantship during part of those), I finally found a job in my field. Well sort of. Close enough, anyway. Yippee!!! Woo Hoo!!! I'm finally hangin' up my steel toe boots! :D

So now I don't know what I'm going to use this blog for. :)

Okay, I might still do the interview question series.

Or maybe I'll start a series on work life.

And then there's always the photography.

Right now everything's so new - and so busy as I acclimate myself and learn this new position - that I just haven't had time to breathe or reflect on much of anything else. I love it though! (One of my first duties was attending a week long training by Wipfli on OMB Circulars in Helena, Montana - a pretty far piece for this hoosier girl. =:o)



Anyway ... this is a holiday weekend for those of us in the U.S., so happy July 4th to all those who celebate. And to those still on the job hunting path, hang in there! You will find something suitable - and when you do, remember to extend a helping hand to some other job seeker! :)

Junebug

On Dentists and Technology Obsolescence

Hi, everyone! I've got a couple more articles for the Job IQ series in the works, but this week, on my birthday (and one year anniversary at my stop-gap job), I'm taking a breather to say that I went to the dentist recently and it got me thinking about some things.

I haven't had dental care in a couple of years, which is unusual for me. Unfortunately with my new dental insurance I had to switch from my dentist of thirty years to a preferred provider. My dentist of thirty years is in his seventies and still practicing. He has taken excellent care of me all this time. While he built a beautiful modern office building several years ago, his tools have remained essentially the same over time- the traditional lifting and reclining dentist chair, the spitting fountain, etc. And of course his fingers, his eyes, his intelligence, and his formidable skill.

What's your job IQ (Interview Question)?

Happy April, folks! Spring is coming on fast and strong, and all kinds of things are waking up and greening up and growing up. They need planting or cutting or trimming or weeding or feeding. My husband Benny is on the mend from open heart surgery in January and is starting up with his furniture refinishing sideline business again. After a slow winter, three good job opportunities have come up within the last two weeks, so I have my applications in and am keeping my fingers crossed. My hopefully temporary factory job has been fun lately. I have a brand new pair of eye glasses, thanks to the company I'm working for. After 5 years, I can see again - yes! We've been spending a lot of time out on the lot at the factory inspecting new cars - and since the new car lot is so big, they buy us lunch. You can't hardly beat a deal where they pay you and feed you to get exercise and a sun tan! :)

Anyway, thinking back to all the job interviews I've gone to in the last few years, I thought it might be fun to start a series on some of the interview questions I've encountered. I got out on the web and searched for other sites that might deal with this topic. I've found tons of expert advise, but not much where people share their own experiences and offer their own thoughts. So I thought I would deal with one question a week, as time allows, and say how I would answer it, and hopefully, other readers will chime in with their own thoughts and experiences.

Let's just have fun with it! :)

As I come across useful sites, I will post links. Here's another job blogger that offers some really great insights into job-hunting from her own personal experience! And she's a photographer to boot! :)

So here's my first question. In several positions I have interviewed for, I've been asked,

"What's your idea (or definition) of customer service?"

That question seems to come up a lot, even in companies and in positions where you don't necessarily deal directly with the outside customer. At the University we had a lot of professional development seminars on Total Quality Management and identifying the internal customer, who could be your boss, your colleagues, or other departments in the company. So I guess a place to start may be to ask the interviewer to comment on whom they think the customers are, with regards to this position. In addition to demonstrating general human consideration and courtesy and responsiveness and professionalism, I think I need to know who my customer is, and what may they be "buying" from me, before I can give concretely helpful answers to the interviewers on how I would approach giving the best possible customer service. The other thing I would ask myself is why the interviewer is asking me this question - what information is he/she trying to discover. For instance, do I seem service-oriented? Am I flexible (interruptable) and responsive (quick to get back to people)? Am I easy to get a hold of? Am I a good listener and adequately analytical so that I understand and deliver what the customer wants? Am I attentive? Am I courteous and diplomatic? Do my products work correctly and are they reliable and do I give good customer support for them? How do I deal with realistic and unrealistic customer expecations?

As a programmer/analyst with a background in education as well (and with a bent toward constructist and cognitivist learning theories), I believe the involvement of the customer is essential. And even though we may have limited access to the customer's time, the success or failure of a particular design project may hinge on how well the customer feels that he is able to put things together in his own head. Modern systems design and analysis techniques with their emphasis on systematic and methodological approaches would do well to consider the customer cognition component as well. Part of customer service is scaffolding that process, as I did with an agency in town who were trying to match their business requirements to an off-the-shelf piece of software they had previously acquired.

One unusual twist to this question that I had in an interview was,

"Tell me about a time you absolutely over-joyed a customer."

In my line of work I have had opportunity to make people happy - I told about the time when I developed a "kick ass" service and salvage program to do exactly what my customer wanted in their favorite low budget software package which at the time was Filemaker Pro, or when I developed the Order System and cut a labor intensive task that took a week down to three days every two weeks - and the users loved it because it was soooo easy ... and there are other stories as well. But sometimes you have to stop and really think because while the customer may be very pleased, he may not be a gushing personality, or you may not hear the positive feedback first hand.

Well, that's all for now. One advantage to blogging about interview questions is that I can just tell my interviewers to read my blog. Ha! (Just kidding). But sometimes it would be nice to have more time to consider one's answers, wouldn't it?

Stay tuned for more job IQs (interview questions). ;) And in the meantime, happy spring and happy job-hunting! And here's some May Flowers for you. :)

JuneBug

April Sunshine

Time for another photo post! I picked my first bouquet of daffodils in my new home this week. It was a special treat because I never had much success with daffodils at my previous residence of twenty years. But the former owner of this place sure did, as you can see.

One of my favorite blogs is entitled November Sunshine. Indiana springs are often as cold and sullen as Novembers are gray, but if yellow maple leaves are November Sunshine then surely the yellow daffodil is March and April Sunshine. :)

Nothing really revolutionary here. I applied the Photoshop palette knife filter to this photo. (I often wonder what my late great aunt Firma Philips would think of desktop computers and programs like photoshop. She was an artist and often painted from photographs from a client when she couldn't paint from a live scene.)

Anyway, here it is! Click on the image for a 1024 version if you want something larger, like for your desktop.




Happy Spring Shutterbugging!

JuneBug

Part Five: Ethics and Lessons Learned

*note to my readers: this is the fifth and final installment in a sort of "catch up series" on my personal job-hunt. I started the series with a couple of job search dilemmas I am currently facing and asked if anyone else is encountering similar difficulties. Then I jumped to the other side of the balance sheet and took a look at the "up" side of being unemployed. :) The fourth post in the series is a recounting of the events that led me to my current job search.

This final post attempts to reflect on lessons learned and on the ethics of current work place practices such as "at will employment" from my perspective. I had hoped it would be shorter than it is, but constructivism and the struggle for meaning doesn't seem to be a short process when life hands us certain materials to work with. Sorry about that. :) After this series the posts should be lighter, shorter, and of more general interest to job seekers as I go about my job search.

Here are the links to the previous posts in the series. It was a story I felt that I needed to tell. Thank you for stopping by.

Intro to the series
My job search dilemma
My (other) job search dilemma
My job search joys
Getting down and dirty



Long before we met our daughter-in-law, my husband used to tell me about a guy named Laurence that he worked with at a local factory that had gone out of business many years ago.

Part Four: Getting Down and Dirty

*note to my readers: this is the fourth installment in a sort of "catch up series" on my personal job-hunt. I recommend starting with the other posts before reading this one, simply in order to place it in context. Since this post is a recounting rather than a reflection or discussion, you may find the other posts more interesting. You'll certainly find them shorter! :) Here are the links for the preceding posts in the series.

• Intro to the series
• My job search dilemma
• My (other) job search dilemma
• My job search joys

The problem with getting philosophical about, or gaining perspective on an actual event is that first you have to review what happened. It occurs to me as I stand on the line in the auto plant, thinking back to my last (fulltime) job (in my field), in between checking spare tires on the cars that go slowly by, that things like divorces and lawsuits are long and incredibly tedious things interesting only to those who lived them. In the end you want to get beyond them (and so does everyone else who knows you). But it’s not simple, is it, because in moving away you also struggle toward the next vista, the one that affords you the bird's eye view, that place where you can lean back and take it all in and perhaps talk about lessons learned and larger ethical issues.

However, for those of you CSI afficionados who appreciate the close camera angles and the gory details, this is my story.

Part Three: My Job Search Joys

*note to my readers: this is the third installment in a sort of "catch up series" on my personal job-hunt. Here are the links for the preceding posts in the series.

• Intro to the series
• My job search dilemma
• My (other) job search dilemma

In my previous posts I've been discussing some of the dilemmas and challenges of work life and of job-hunting. I figure it's time to take a breather from such serious fare and look at the other side of the balance sheet. Life has its hardships but it also has its sweetness. We are currently in the season of Lent, looking forward to Easter and the Resurrection - and yes, to spring. I often think that if the only image we had of Jesus was his Passion, in all its gory detail as depicted in Mel Gibson's latest movie (I'm told), many of us would run screaming the other way. But I don't believe that was God's intent with the crucifixion story. He gave us so much more. He gave us all the stories of Jesus' life and all of Bible history in fact. He gave us the Resurrection. I guess what I'm saying is that we need to put things into their full context. That's also true in our own lives -

Part Two: My (Other) Job Search Dilemma

*note to my readers: this is part two in a sort of "catch up series" on my personal job-hunt. Here are the links for the preceding posts in the series.

• Intro to the series
• My job search dilemma

My other dilemma in trying to find work in my field IS my field, quite frankly. Information Technology is a rapidly changing field. If your present work can't or won't afford you actual work experience and/or training in the latest technologies, as is often the case, prospective employers will often consider you out-dated.

One effect of the rapidly changing technology field is to shift the normal progression of education in a person's life into reverse.

Part One: My Job Search Dilemma

But before we get started, a couple of odd thoughts ...

Job Interviews - are you tired of the insanity? Can't there be another way (or three) that employers and employees can get to know one another or size one another up before critical decisions are made? A more frank, out-on-the-table, on-the-level meeting of the minds? Perhaps, for me this blog can accomplish that.

But beyond that, did you ever wonder who winds up getting these jobs that you read about and apply for on Monster, CareerBuilder, etc.? Wouldn't you love to follow them around for a week or few just to see what the job is like and if you really would like to do it?


On to part one, the first installment in a sort of "catch up series" on my personal job-hunt. The series will discuss a couple of dilemmas I am encountering on this particular job-search, take a breather and a look at some of the advantages I've found in being in job-hunt mode, then recount (as briefly as possible) the events that lead me to my job search, then back off for an philosophical overview of ethics and lessons learned. I hope to find some kindred spirits out there, smilarly engaged in job-hunting, and also some sophisticated and savvy employers. In short, I hope to help and to find help.

Introducing a Series on Job Hunting

Greetings on a balmy March day in the midwest!

My next series of entries will revolve around a common theme - a candid look at the challenges of finding work at this point in my life, the rewards of a career, and the ethics of certain work place practices from my own experience. Here's how I hope things will evolve- the next couple of entries will deal with a couple of key dilemmas I am experiencing in my job search. Hopefully some of my readers will be able to relate and even offer their own perspectives. Then I would like to jump to the other side of the balance sheet and take a look at some blessings and things I have to be thankful for in my work life. The final post, if I get to it, will deal with some ethical questions about realities in our present day work environment that have touched me personally, issues such as "at will employment" and equity and fairness, and how I feel about these things.

Scattered throughout, you will find my hopes and dreams and my fears. :) So if you're curious, consider this post your road map, and drive on to part one!

JuneBug

Looking toward spring

In our neck of the woods, spirea is one of the earlier blooming bushes of spring. I always look forward to the fragrant grace of spirea's long, cascading white branches. Here is a pic of abundant spirea blooms taken with my Olympus C3030 digital camera.

I wanted to use this photo for computer wall paper, but it didn't possess the sharpness and detail I had hoped for at larger sizes - perhaps due to camera shake or memory limitations or whatever. At any rate, I tried out Photoshop's palette knife effect to make the image look more like a painting. I was pleased with the results. The image seems almost impressionistic in how it relays a moment of light and color on a young spring morning.

Click on image to see full size photo

Happy Spring Shutterbugging!

JuneBug

The Down Side of Flower Power

Something insidious has been happening in our society. It's been going on for a long, long time, but I just put my finger on it the other day when listening to President Bush's speech in India.

Neither Benny or I are big fans of President Bush or the Iraq war. Having grown up in the Viet Nam era, it makes me feel so sad that we're back at it with a new generation of young people after so long. But when President Bush said, "Don't fall for the assumption that people are satisfied with the status quo of tyranny and abuse in their countries - rather, side with the rebels and the forces of freedom, and give them the opportunity to make their own choice," it made me think.